


i can see you so clearly now

by orphan_account



Series: love in the dark [2]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, M/M, Mentions of Death, Mentions of Murder, welcome to renjun's magic apothecary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:40:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24043762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Donghyuck isn't even supposed tobehere, standing tall and dark at the door of Renjun's cafe, and yet, there he is, scaring customers away.Yeah, seems about right. Just another regular Tuesday.
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun & Lee Donghyuck | Haechan, Mark Lee/Na Jaemin (Referenced)
Series: love in the dark [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1734400
Comments: 5
Kudos: 37





	i can see you so clearly now

Tuesday, for Renjun, begins like any other Tuesday: after he wakes up, he brushes his teeth, washes his face, and heads downstairs to open the cafe. The exhaustion from staying up late last night directing the delivery trolls inside spills over into today’s morning, but he still manages to be downstairs five minutes before opening. Right on schedule. 

People trickle in throughout the morning, but since supply shipments arrive Monday evenings, Renjun spends most of the day in the back room, drowning behind boxes of dry product. Chenle and Jisung like to pretend the crates are filled with all sorts of contraband, eyeballs and the like, instead of what it really is— mostly bags of rice, tea leaves, coffee, and sugar. 

There’s something comforting about the home he makes for himself on Tuesday mornings, buried amidst new knick knacks and ingredients for his cafe. He spreads them out systematically on the storage room floor before shelving them, slow and careful. 

Chenle pops in every half hour or so to pester him about how it’s organized _enough_ , come help us out front, but Renjun likes the otherwise tedious cataloguing that Tuesday mornings bring him. 

At hour three, six Chenles in, Renjun starts to feel the slow burn in his arms. 

However, magic is messy when conducted by humans like himself, and without careful organization, can combine to react on his own. 

He’d received a large new set of pressed lavender for the pantry, and systemizing and re-systemizing the whole thing takes longer than he’d estimated. Lunch is pushed back to about two in the afternoon, which is, in his opinion, is less than optimal, but Jeno, Jisung, and Chenle seem to be doing a good enough job taking orders and keeping things clean in the front. 

(“Cleaning and organizing are important,” Renjun reminds the three of them frequently. “And we can’t use magic as a shortcut,” he says, more to Jisung than all three of them as a collective. 

The young gumiho is magic by nature and still a novice at controlling the flow of magic through him. His mana gives him the virtue of completing spells without conduits entirely, which makes Renjun’s job of teaching him a little harder than he’d like it to be. 

As a witch himself, he can only conduct magic through the things around him, like food and tiger’s eye.

It’s not spite, or anything, that Renjun feels towards the youngest; he’s grown far past that, he’s sure. Rather, he has a tendency to stumble over the unique things he needs to be mindful of whenever he’s given the opportunity to teach his apprentice something new.) 

Feeling the toll of being (mostly) alone all morning, he puts his agenda on pause to poke his head into the front of the store. 

Almost like magic, right as Renjun enters, Chenle spills an iced Americano on the back counter. And exactly on cue, Jisung curses under his breath and tries to will the drink off the counter with his mind. Figures. 

“You have to remember that using magic to clean is like layering dust over the mess,” he explains, and Jisung jumps a little when he hears Renjun’s voice. 

Jeno turns from the customer he’s talking to, a tall boy with soft features and red hair, to hand Renjun a rag, same bright-as-sun smile on his face from beginning to end. Renjun likes to pretend that he can serve customers with as much grace as Jeno, but he knows at the back of his mind that Jeno’s an ace at customer service, and quite frankly, that he’s blessed to have him working here. 

“No cleaning with magic,” Renjun explains, pushing patience into his voice as he wipes down the counter neatly. “So we need to make sure that things are in order,” he points a sharp glare at Chenle when he says this, the younger boy fiddling around dangerously with some of the glass jars in the front display. “Or else weird shit will happen.”

Jisung opens his mouth, and Renjun holds his hand up before he can ask any questions. “I don’t know what kind of stuff, and I’m not really interested in finding out.”

Tuesday, for Renjun, ends unlike most other Tuesdays. The day is mostly normal. The routine that unpacking and organizing new goods brings is not unwelcome during what would have otherwise been a hectic morning. 

He reheats the leftover tofu stew from last night and pan-fries spring onion pancakes for the four of them so they can eat lunch. To him, cooking has always been something relaxing, almost cathartic, with or without the magic aspect of it, and the satisfied look on his friends’ faces as they eat is more than enough reward for Renjun’s efforts. 

The extra energy boost he weaves into their lunches to get the four of them through the day has never done them wrong before, either. As far as Renjun is sure of, his cafe runs on three major objectives: know magic, cook food, and profit. 

As they eat, Jisung tells him excitedly about a new customer, a dark-haired human who looks like a human until you notice the fluttering wings in his shadow.

“Hyung, he’s a type of fairy right?” he asks, neglecting the large bowl seated in front of him, which Renjun eyes carefully, eyebrows knitted in scrutiny. He doesn’t want it to get cold, but holds himself back from reminding Jisung to eat and tears his gaze away from his food to give Jisung his whole attention. 

“The wings — they’re thin and really long, but only show up if you’re looking from the corner of your eye,” their youngest continues, putting his spoon down, expression all wide eyes and raised eyebrows. 

“Idiot,” Chenle calls him as he picks up another large spoonful of rice drenched in stew. “His ears are just _slightly_ pointed, didn’t you notice?” 

Jeno hums back from the other side of the table, already through most of his meal. “The ring he wears around his neck on that gold chain gives it all away, you two; stop bickering over it. I think he might be a wood sprite, if his wings really are like how you described them.”

“Or a water spirit!” Chenle says through a mouthful of food. 

Renjun shakes his head, putting his spoon down, biting back the desire to tease the youngest pair. “If you really want to know, you should ask him. What did he order?” 

“I think it was black tea,” Jisung mutters pensively. “Or maybe Oolong? He got it with milk.” 

“Okay,” Renjun replies, words careful on his tongue. “And what does that do again?” He grins devilishly at Jisung, catching his eye before Jisung lowers his gaze, embarrassed. 

Chenle snaps his fingers. “I got it!” He points a finger gun at Renjun as he exclaims, “Elf knight!” 

“Wow,” Jeno says, impressed. “And I thought you only worked here for the free food. Muscle pains and wing issues, right?” 

Renjun hums, glad Chenle was able to answer his question, tucking away the reminder to review the menu with Jisung again tonight. He picks up his bowl and cutlery to take it to the sink. “Yeah. It works for joint problems too, if he was a wood sprite. But I think he would have ordered something else. Maybe a matcha?” 

The rest of lunch is mostly quiet, Jisung finishing his food with a pensive look on his face as Chenle and Jeno wolf down their fare next to him. They take their things to the sink when they’re done eating, thanking Renjun for the food, and take to the floor again for the rest of the afternoon. 

Truthfully, Renjun’s glad for the peace that Tuesdays bring him. New shipments mean he spends most of the morning in solitude and away from customers. He usually cleans up after lunch, too, so it’s not until the early evening does he have to spend time in the front. It’s a relief, really; he doesn’t know what he’d do without the trio manning the store right now. Run himself ragged, probably.

Renjun’s elbow deep in soapy water when the front door chimes an unfamiliar melody: three notes, instead of two; the sound of a new customer coming in. He calls Jisung into the kitchen to send him back out to take care of it, which is roundabout, perhaps, but he’d learnt, slowly, from Chenle, that Jisung needs a little nudge here and there, despite how quickly he learns. 

(“You couldn’t answer my question earlier,” Renjun jokes as if that’s the reason he nudges Jisung out with his foot, which is only half of it, and Jisung whines out a long “Hyuuung,” as he steps out. 

The other half is that Jisung is the only one out of the three creatures he has stationed in the front that’s his actual apprentice, while the other two simply work there.)

It’s only until a few minutes afterwards, when Renjun is placing the dishes on the drying rack to the right of the sink, does Jisung pop his head back into the small kitchen. 

“Uh, hyung?” he asks, voice tentative. “I think you might want to take this one yourself.” Jisung is fiddling with the ring on his finger, a sign of jittery nervousness, and when he speaks again, he’s talking more to his hand than to Renjun. “We have the same ring?” 

Jisung continues to mutter to himself, twisting the band on his finger back and forth, saying things about “But Jaemin-hyung is the only one with a band like this; Chenle and Jeno have matching _bracelets_ .”  
  
He’s not wrong, actually, and Renjun is glad for how damn observant Jisung is in moments like this one. Renjun is sure he’s only ever made two ring glamours of that style before. He knows he favours bigger charms, like bracelets, over rings, but who can blame him? Containing magic in such small objects is a labouring process, which is why he sticks to larger jewelery. 

Besides, bracelets hold more charmed stones, and the magic is easier to contain with longer lengths of gold or silver. To the witch, reliability is a good enough payoff for the material cost. 

Jisung is still going on about how “Jaemin-hyung is the only one who should have a ring like that,” even as Renjun’s wiped his hands on a dishtowel and made his way into the front of the shop. 

This is where Tuesday starts to get weird. 

When Renjun rounds the corner into the space behind the front counter, he’s greeted with an unfamiliar sight: a boy, about his age, maybe younger, dressed in all black. Black faux leather jacket layered over a black hoodie, black jeans, black sneakers, and the familiar black stone on his left pointer finger, a stone that should be on Jaemin’s finger. 

None of this would be particularly concerning if it wasn’t for the whiteness of his lips, stained a purpley-red on the inside, and the notebook-shaped bulge in the right side of his jacket. 

_“Bingo. A grim reaper,”_ Renjun thinks, almost sure of himself aside from the slim chance that technically, it’s possible that it could be a human standing before him, but it’s not often that regular humans stumble into his little cafe. The building is glamoured from the outside to prevent cases like this, and the ring on the boy’s finger explains why his skin is so tan it’s almost glowing, rather than the grey complexion characteristic of reapers. 

Besides, the paleness of his lips indicates death by drowning, and reapers are only born through cases of murder. 

He’s fidgeting under Renjun’s gaze, fiddling with the ring on his hand in a way similar to that of Jisung, and Renjun is suddenly very aware that he’s supposed to be tending to a shop right now. 

The hooded boy beats him to it, saying “Hi,” a little too loudly before he lowers his head and coughs into his fist, clearing his throat. Renjun notices that his skin is dotted with tiny moles, almost like a constellation, and it’s hard to imagine such a lovely young human being killed by someone.

“Hi,” he tries again, looking Renjun straight in the eye. “My name is Donghyuck. I’m a friend of Jaemin’s.” 

Ah. A friend of Jaemin’s. “Oh,” Renjun replies, raising his eyebrows in slight surprise. To be honest, Renjun’s never dealt with a reaper before, much less seen one in the flesh, but this seems like a case for less actual _magic_ needed and shaped a little more like “customer service”. 

“Give me a second,” Renjun tells him, holding up a finger. “Let me get Jeno.” 

“Wait,” Donghyuck says, pulling his hood down. “I’m here to see Renjun, not whoever this ‘Jeno’ is.” He removes the glamour and puts the charm on the table, and Renjun watches in awe as the tan almost sucks itself out of Donghyuck’s skin, all signs of the sun kissing his complexion wringing itself out of him. His blonde hair looks washed out, if washing your hair could turn it grey, and his once warm chocolate irises are now dark and lifeless, staring back at Renjun. 

Renjun knows what glamours do for other people, but never once has he seen it work like this. Never once has he seen someone die like this in front of him.

Death is supposed to be slow; it took its toll on Jaemin slowly, but Jaemin is a stubborn force who must have forced life out of his own death when he came running for Renjun that day, eyes brimming with tears and begging for a solution. 

This, he supposes, is what death looks like when it kneads through you inside and out. 

“Hello?” Donghyuck asks, leaning over the counter slightly and waving a hand in Renjun’s face. “Are you okay?” His eyebrows are bunched together, creasing his forehead, and Renjun wants to stretch a hand out and smooth out the worry in his expression. 

Instead, he clears his throat and looks Donghyuck in the eye. “I’m Renjun. What can I do for you?” His voice is level, nerves steeled against the reaper before him.

At the sound of his name, Donghyuck’s eyebrows lift up, wrinkling his forehead in surprise. “Great! It’s kind of a long story, and it has to do with your friend Jaemin,” he says, as he pushes the ring on the counter towards Renjun, “who’s dead now.” His voice does not shake, but his eyes dart around the shop quickly. Silence stretches out, long and sticky between them as Donghyuck’s gaze floats past Renjun, flitting from shelf to shelf. 

Renjun does not really know what the deal with Jaemin being dead is. As far as he knows, Jaemin’s death is old news. 

He quirks his eyebrows just slightly, almost a twitch in his unfaltering expression, in response to Donghyuck’s claim, to which Donghyuck adds, “Permanently.” He’s finished scrutinizing the ingredients lined up behind Renjun apparently. “I escorted him to the other side.”

Okay. This is new news. And, from Renjun’s experience, it doesn’t seem like something that can be dealt with through a quick fix. 

Renjun picks up the ring, pocketing it in his apron, and beckons for Donghyuck to come inside. “You can make your way to the kitchen,” he says, heading to the front of the store, startlingly aware of Donghyuck’s blank expression following his back, and continues, ignoring it. 

“I’ll close up for today.”   
  


* * *

  
  
  


It takes a few awkward minutes for Renjun to clear out the shop and deal with the last few customers; but he realizes that, when he finally gets to the kitchen to make some _hotteok_ for the four of them and their new guest, Donghyuck is already comfortably talking to Jeno as if the two of them are long familiar, easy conversation passing between them like it would between old friends. 

“So he tells me, ‘I’ll sell it to you for a penny,’” Donghyuck says to Jeno. The reaper’s elbows are propped up on the small wooden table in the middle of the room. Jeno’s face is lit up with that eye smile of his, charm turned up to the max. 

Donghyuck is leaning forward so far Renjun thinks he may as well be lying down on the table. “And when I ask him why he’s offering his soul for a penny, he has the nerve to tell me,” Donghyuck pauses to clear his throat and puts on one of the best-worst impressions of Jaemin’s that Renjun’s ever seen, “I wanted a soda, and I only have a dollar forty nine.” 

The whole scene set in front of him is so absurd that Renjun can’t help but laugh from his spot at the doorway. Donghyuck shifts his gaze to look at Renjun from the corner of his eye, suddenly lacking the grandeur he carried when he was telling his story to Jeno. 

Or maybe not; maybe Renjun is imagining the whole ordeal. 

Either way, he heads to the kitchen counter to prepare some hotteok, pretending not to listen in on the rest of their conversation. He catches bits and pieces of Jaemin’s last words to Donghyuck before his departure and Jeno explaining what the cafe does exactly (“Just… Just think of it as an apothecary shop, Hyuck. A magical over-the-counter.”) as he pulls out last night’s dough, brown sugar, walnuts, and cinnamon to push into pancakes.

At some point, as Renjun’s laying the pancakes into a lightly oiled pan, Chenle and Jisung work up a ruckus pushing each other into the kitchen. Renjun takes an eye off the stove to see the four of them squeezed together around the small kitchen table. 

Something in his chest tightens as he watches the four of them, the din of their conversation rising above the sizzling of oil in his pan. Glamours are off, mostly; Donghyuck blends into their ragtag group of friends almost perfectly. The grey of his skin matches the vines in Jeno’s hair, both of them fitting in with Jisung and Chenle’s collective eighteen tails. 

Renjun can feel Donghyuck’s gaze on his back, carefully studying Renjun as he gently tosses the pancakes in his pan. Jeno pulls out five pairs of metal chopsticks as Renjun flips the hot cakes onto a ceramic plate. Jeno pulls out a pair of chopsticks for all five of them and sets them on the table. 

“Thank you for the food!” Chenle and Jisung call out in unison, ignoring the chopsticks altogether, letting sticky sugar drip over their hands; it would be scalding on anyone else’s skin but their own. 

Donghyuck picks one up and drops it into a paper cup. He gently pokes at it with a chopstick and watches the sugar and crumbs of walnut peek out slowly. “Do these do something?” he asks the _hotteok_ , eyebrows furrowed. 

Jeno bites into his own, pinching it between his chopsticks and neatly inhaling half of it in one go, but Renjun can’t find it in himself to chide any of them for their eating habits.

“These?” Renjun asks, lifting his own _hotteok_ slightly, as if giving a toast with his chopsticks. Donghyuck nods, gingerly licking the sugar off the tips of his own chopsticks. “These aren’t magic. They’re magically tasty, maybe,” he says, raising an eyebrow, cracking a smile at his own joke as Jeno groans through a mouthful of pan-fried dough and sugar. 

“Food brings people together,” Chenle pipes up, chasing the syrup on his fingers with his mouth. “Renjun nags us about it all the time.” He pulls a face, directing it to Jisung, and Jisung snickers behind a sugar-coated hand. 

Renjun rolls his eyes and finally bites off a normal sized bite from his own food, looking at Donghyuck from the corner of his eye as he watches him pick up his _hotteok_ to do the same. He picks up the pace after his first taste, quickly swallowing down a bigger bite.  
  
“ _Hotteok_ don’t need to be magic to make you feel good, and even though it’s not any more than chilly today, it’s still comforting.” 

When Renjun looks up from his food, Donghyuck and Jeno are already both on their seconds. Chenle and Jisung are bickering as usual but this time the older is trying to smear the _hotteok_ filling on Jisung’s cheeks. He’s unfortunately successful in inciting battle, glistening streaks of brown sugar on both their faces. 

“Donghyuck is a friend of Jaemin’s,” Renjun declares, putting his chopsticks down on the table.  
  
Donghyuck whips his head to look at Renjun, eyes blown wide. “What are you doing,” Renjun hears him mutter but he chooses to ignore the grim reaper. 

“He said he guided Jaemin over to the other side a short while ago,” Renjun continues, rolling the words around in his mouth deliberately before he lets them go. Jisung and Chenle still from combat to focus on Renjun and Jeno sits a little straighter. 

“Is there anything else they should know, Donghyuck?” 

Donghyuck shakes his head, visibly relaxing his shoulders when he sees that everyone else’s expressions are unwavering. “No. That’s it. He told me you were the one who made his glamour, so I came to find you. It took me longer than I thought, about three days, maybe, but I’m here now.” 

Donghyuck blinks, tapping his fingers on the table to a steady rhythm. Jisung has returned to finishing his pancake and Chenle and Jeno seem to be engaging in some sort of non-verbal conversation, an argument between the eyes. “I can’t go back, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Donghyuck adds, coal black eyes piercing into Renjun as he says so. 

A loud screech fills the air, the sound of Jisung pushing his seat away from the table. He stands still, face flushed, before he clears his throat awkwardly. “I’m done eating. Thanks for the food, hyung.” 

Chenle gets up to join him, and Jeno follows soon after, patting Renjun on the shoulder, a silent way of voicing solidarity. 

They ditch their dishes in the sink before heading out and quickly drawing out of Renjun’s line of sight. Great. Leave him to listen to the rest of Donghyuck’s story. Alone. 

Donghyuck coughs into his fist while using his other hand to prop his chopsticks against the plate in the center of the table. 

  
He sighs, slips his ring back on, and places his forearms on the tabletop. “You know, if it helps, he wasn’t supposed to be there. I wasn’t even supposed to show up since I was originally scheduled for paperwork that day,” he explains. 

Donghyuck talks with his hands, Renjun notices quietly. There’s a grey smoke gathering between the reaper’s fingers, spinning in the air in front of him as he speaks. 

“And then Doyoung-hyung told me to head out, that Sicheng would do the paperwork instead, and suddenly I was there, looking at someone who seemed alive, hitting at the hospital vending machine for no reason. I was so fucking confused,” he laughs, “Because he looked… He looked not-dead.” 

Donghyuck’s voice quiets for the next part. “It was funny, sure; I’ve never seen anyone act like that in the face of someone coming to collect their soul, but it was also scary.” His gaze shifts to look back at Renjun. “He looked so alive. I didn’t want to take him over.” 

Alive. Again, alive. It’s so funny, that word, because clearly Jaemin was dead, and clearly they were breaking rules by keeping him around on Earth. Maybe some sort of magic karmic balance needed to take Mark too, but Renjun wasn’t really counting on losing his friend so quickly. When do you ever count on someone dying?

“I know…” Renjun begins, testing the waters by letting his gaze flicker to check Donghyuck’s expression before he pauses, taking a breath to calm his trembling voice. 

Donghyuck waits for him to continue, large eyes blinking at Renjun, arms stretched out and hands folded on the table. He’s uncharacteristically quiet in this moment, something Renjun’s realized about him within the past couple of hours they’ve spent together: Donghyuck uses noise to fill in for empty spaces, words spilling from him almost constantly like he’s trying to make up for something missing. 

“I know; no, I knew he was dead.” Renjun continues, looking away from Donghyuck to focus on the wood grain of the kitchen table. “I knew he didn’t come back to us that day like he could have suddenly been alive, or anything, but it was easy to forget that he’d really died just like that.”

Donghyuck says nothing in response. Removing the ring from his finger, he slides it across the table to Renjun, and Renjun picks it up, quiet again. The silence in between them hangs thick and gooey in the air, like the sugar filling in the hotteok they’d just been eating a few minutes ago. 

Renjun stares at the ring, turning it over in his fingers a few times before he speaks again. “Glamours are expensive. Like, really expensive. I could have sold this to a paying customer for enough to not work for a couple of weeks,” he says, lifting his gaze to see Donghyuck looking directly at him, almost through him, like he knows how the story Renjun is telling will end. 

“Jaemin was so lucky I had this just sitting around,” Renjun laughs dryly. It sounds choked in his ears. “He came looking for me with tears in his eyes.” His voice goes quiet. “He was talking about Mark, saying how Mark was still alive but that he didn’t want to be the one to leave first.” 

Donghyuck slowly kicks his leg forward under the table, slouching slightly to rest it against the inside of Renjun’s leg. 

Renjun breathes in deep, holding it for a count before letting it out slowly. “Anyway. I thought they’d make it a little longer than just a couple of years. That’s all.” 

Things happen, and Renjun knows that, the facts etched into everything he does: magic is circular, like the movement of water through the earth, and like the flow of life and death through all creatures, not just humans. Certain spells are more stable; certain things last longer than others, while others fade faster. 

These are facts he can count on, things that hold true no matter how much time ticks away. 

“He told me we could have been friends,” Donghyuck says, voice hushed and rough around the edges. Pulling himself up to sit straighter in his seat, Donghyuck continues. “I was drowned. A long time ago. I stopped counting the years since that day once I hit thirty, but I died when I was seventeen.” He pauses and shifts his gaze to look at the ceiling. 

“It’s an in-between age, I guess, but most kids who get murdered aren’t assigned to become reapers after they die. I’m one of the youngest ones in our division, so I don’t—” Donghyuck coughs lightly before looking at Renjun with glassy eyes. He blinks once, hard. “I didn’t have many friends, I never had the chance to make that many.” 

“He told me we could have been friends,” Donghyuck repeats, voice dry and thick in his throat, “if things were different. Sometimes,” Donghyuck trails off and slumps in his seat, tucking his legs under his chair. “I just wish he didn’t have to die; maybe it’s because I _did_ , but I don’t know, it’s just shitty when you’re young and dead.” 

Against all expectations, including his own, Renjun stretches his hand out for Donghyuck to hold, and Donghyuck takes it. It’s unexpectedly soft, warm too, but Renjun isn’t sure what he would have expected from the reaper in the first place. 

“You can stay here,” Renjun blurts out, surprising himself. “If you want,” he adds quickly, releasing Donghyuck’s hand. “Since you don’t seem like you have anywhere else to go, and we could always use another pair of hands around the shop, and—”

Donghyuck holds Renjun’s still-outstretched hand with both of his own, cutting him off. “Thank you.” 

Renjun flinches, almost, but catches himself, the movement never making it past a mere tightening of his eyes. Donghyuck’s not _sunny_ , definitely not alive or anything, but his hands are warm and his eyes are kind and when he slips on the glamour his hair shines like gold thread in the cafe’s floor lighting. 

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe it’s enough for his glamoured-on skin to glow in the sunlight when he stands by the front windows; maybe it’s enough for the corners of his eyes to crinkle when he smiles and laughs the same as any of them. 

When Renjun looks up to meet Donghyuck’s eyes, he laughs, weak in the face of his impish grin, and agrees. “Don’t expect it to be so easy, Donghyuck. We still have lots of work to do around here.” 

“You’re on, Junnie.” His face is bright, alive, speckled with details like the constellation of moles on his cheeks and the small scar cutting through his left eyebrow. 

Renjun grins, getting up from his seat to stand head-to-almost-head with Donghyuck. 

“Hey,” Donghyuck bites back, tone playful and most importantly once again matching his appearance. “You’re the one that owes me one for subverting the system. There’s no _way_ what Jaemin told me was the whole story.”

“How did you do it, anyway?” 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> it took literally everything in me to not name this zero o'clock 
> 
> thanks for reading! if u liked it .... well. i am holding my hat out for kudos & comments<3 
> 
> [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/jwloveclub)
> 
> tmi but this was written to love in the dark by jessie reyez


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